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Google Places Problem

When I placed a business in Google Places, the "generic" ranking fell off the map. I now just have the 1 line Google places reference and that is all I can find. How can I get around that and get my 4 line description to show again?

Do I have to delete my Places account? Before the Google Places account was built, the company was moving up the SERP ranks, now he is on pg 1 for Places but the other SERP positions have disappeared. This is true for all the keywords we are targeting. If there is not a Places reference he shows on Pg 3-5 (given the website is 4 weeks old, I think this is not bad).

For the same client, he that services many of the surrounding communities. How do I get Google to recognize the various towns he services during a search? He places well for his "home" town but not at all for the other towns.

2 Responses

Hi Scott - does the url on your places listing point to the same page that dropped out of the organic serps? This is pretty normal, Google just doesn't give an organic and local spot to the same page of a website. But the authority of that page is still helping you earn your places rank.

For phrases that have any competition at all, it's nearly impossible to appear in the local pack with an address that doesn't correspond to the city of search. It's just kind of the way local works.

Colin is correct as to the SERP behavior you are seeing after claiming your client's Google Place/Google+ Local page. The client's previous organic rank will be subsumed into his new blended local rank. Once upon a time, it was common for dominant businesses to have more than one listing per page for a targeted keyword phrase. In fact, they might have one or two organic spots, a local spot, a video, directory listings for their company and what have you, if they were truly dominant. Around the time of the Venice update, this changed and it became next-to-impossible to find any business with more than one spot in the top 10.

So, this is something that's important for you to understand, working in Local. Either you have an organic listing or a local one, but seldom both.

Exceptions to this: for some searches in categories or geographic regions where Google has very little data they trust, a business will sometimes have more that one spot in the SERPs. For example, let's say your client is the only muffler repair shop serving 10 tiny towns in the country. If he's got a decent website, he might end up with more than one spot on page one, but that's typically the main case in which you'll see this exception these days.

Post-Venice, some Local SEOs did do some experiments with trying to get double page 1 rankings. Frankly, I'm not sure how well these tactics are working in 2013, but you might want to give this a read:

Regarding your other question, it's critical to understand that Google views your client as being relevant to his city of location - not the cities where he serves. It's all about physical address. This has led to the development of the practice of creating city landing pages with the purpose of gaining ORGANIC (not local) rankings for service radius cities for go-to-client business models. I suggest you read this piece I published recently on this:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403

Read that, and you'll be totally up to date on your client's options in this regards.

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